The “Bernardino Telesio - Doctorate School of Science and Technique” (BTSST) was established with the aim of creating an advanced educational nucleus in southern Italy that may attract foreign students to Calabria for post-graduate studies in the areas of physics, chemistry and computational engineering.

The School is based at the Università della Calabria (UNICAL) which is a relatively new university, often referred to as “the youngest of the old universities”. In fact, founded in 1972, UNICAL was the first Italian university to be founded after World War II and is the last Italian University to be established as an independent ex novo institution and not as a "gemmation" of an existing university. This political choice was motivated by the need to provide higher education in the region Calabria, which, at the time, along with the region Basilicata, had no tertiary educational institutions. In addition, UNICAL was the first Italian university established according to the concept of “campus”, extending over more than 200 hectares of lush green hills along the northern edge of Cosenza. UNICAL is also proud to host one of the largest library systems in southern Italy. Although the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Structural Engineering at UNICAL are “young” compared to those at more famous historical Italian universities, these Departments have nonetheless achieved international acclaim for the high quality and standard of scientific research that up-to-date instrumentation, optimal inter-faculty rapport and active ongoing collaborations with European as well as extra-European research groups has established.

For example, the Doctorate Programmes in Physics, Science and Technology of Mesophases and Molecular Materials (STM3), Inorganic Chemistry Methods (ICM), Methodologies for the Development of Molecules of Pharmacological interest (MDMP) and Computational Mechanics (CM) offered at UNICAL have, over the years, produced a number of excellent young researchers who have continued avant guard scientific research work in both Italian institutions and elsewhere. In fact, both the Doctorate Programmes in Physics and that in Chemistry (which, with the passage of Italian universities from national to local autonomous management gave rise to the current STM3, ICM and MDMP Doctorate Programmes) at UNICAL were established when Doctorate Degree Programmes were first introduced throughout all Italian universities in 1982.

In the past years, anticipating a recent quest from MUIR, these doctoral programmes started a path toward the institution of a bigger, multidisciplinary Institution that in 2008 has brought to their full merging in the pre existing “Bernardino Telesio School of Hard Sciences”, whose main goal was to promoting the enrolment of foreign students, giving birth to the “Bernardino Telesio - Doctorate School of Science and Technique” (BTSST). The BTSST offers Doctoral programs divided in five Curricula.

The Bernardino Telesio School of Science and Technique aims to cultivate the concept that knowledge, its creation, delineation and dissemination, is a process that surpasses national boundaries. Therefore, in addition to promoting the enrolment of foreign students, the School supports synergistic research collaborations between the different laboratories of the BTSST Curricula at UNICAL and seeks to provide its doctoral students extensive and varied research and educational experiences at other research institutions, both in Italy and abroad, by maximising support for student mobility.